4 Call Center Agent Performance Metrics You Might Be Overlooking

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Transforming your call center into a thriving hub of customer satisfaction requires the right blend of efficient agents who can effortlessly meet customer needs. But have you considered the untapped power of agent performance metrics?

These four overlooked or, at the very least, underestimated metrics hold the key to unlocking a data-driven strategy that maximizes your agents’ contributions and revolutionizes your customer experience.

1. Average Hold Time

Average hold time is a crucial metric that measures the duration a call center agent keeps a customer on hold during an inbound call. Unsurprisingly, long hold times can swiftly lead to customer frustration and a diminished experience.

When assessing agent performance, it’s imperative to investigate their average hold time and identify any red flags. Elevated hold rates may indicate a need for assistance or additional training, struggles locating essential information to assist the customer, or delays caused by sluggish or limited technology. While some hold time is understandable, consistently high hold rates warrant a thorough evaluation.

Hold times significantly impact the overall average handling time of customer interactions, a vital key performance indicator (KPI) for evaluating the center’s operational performance. Excessive hold rates can disrupt a call center manager’s ability to appropriately staff their team and effectively develop agent schedules and forecasts. Call centers can enhance customer satisfaction and operational efficiency by addressing and optimizing hold times.

2. Answer Rate

Answer rate measures the percentage of calls an agent successfully answers out of the total number of calls they are presented with. It plays an important role in determining the overall service level of the call center and provides valuable insights into an agent’s accessibility compared to their teammates.

While a high answer rate indicates good availability, it’s important to note that accessibility alone doesn’t guarantee the effective resolution of customer issues in a timely or satisfactory manner. However, analyzing answer rates can shed light on agent activity. If agents are seen to be procrastinating or engaging in non-essential tasks, leading to delays in answering inbound customer calls, it presents clear opportunities for improvement and optimization. Call centers can enhance their overall performance by addressing these issues and providing a better customer experience.

3. Average After-Call Work Time (ACW)

A call center agent’s responsibilities continue after hanging up with a customer. They often must fill out necessary fields regarding the purpose of the customer’s call, how they handled the issue, and whether further assistance from a manager was required. This post-call work, known as After-Call Work (ACW), also includes the time agents must take a breath, refocus, and prepare for the next incoming call.

By monitoring ACW, team leaders can identify agents who complete post-call tasks exceptionally quickly or slowly. This analysis can reveal valuable insights, such as discovering individuals who have found more efficient ways to handle these tasks than their peers. On the other hand, extremely short ACW times might indicate that agents are not taking detailed notes or completing all necessary after-call activities.

Additionally, excessive ACW durations can signal that agents struggle with inputting information promptly or may even intentionally avoid taking customer calls. In such cases, it becomes crucial to reassess the approach to post-call work and explore strategies to lower the averages appropriately. This might involve automating specific post-call tasks or providing retraining opportunities to help agents work more efficiently. Call centers can enhance productivity and overall performance by optimizing the ACW process.

4. Transfer Rate

Transfer rate refers to the percentage of calls agents transfer to someone else within the organization. Typically, calls are transferred when the answering agent cannot fulfill the customer’s request due to a lack of training or access to the necessary tools.

Understanding the average transfer rate of your call center provides management with a valuable metric for evaluating individual agents. If an agent has a transfer rate significantly higher than the average, it warrants further investigation to determine the reasons behind this trend. It could indicate insufficient training or knowledge to address the specific needs of calls directed to their department.

Comparing an agent’s transfer rate to their average handle time is also helpful in assessing agent productivity. A high transfer rate and a low average handle time might suggest that the agent selectively chooses calls and transfers them to other teams instead of assisting the customer. Conversely, a high transfer rate and average handle time could indicate that an agent is struggling and would benefit from additional coaching and support.

By closely monitoring the transfer rate and its relationship to other performance metrics, call center managers can identify areas for improvement, optimize agent productivity, and ensure efficient handling of customer inquiries.

Transforming raw engagement data into actionable intelligence has never been more accessible and efficient.

TCI works with call center leaders like Mitel and Brightmetrics to empower you with the convenience and adaptability to analyze and explore your UC and contact center data, allowing you to gain deep insights into your agents’ strengths and areas for improvement.

By leveraging historical and real-time dashboards, you can access intuitive drag-and-drop tools to effortlessly visualize performance metrics, plan effective strategies, and enhance agent performance and customer experience with just a few simple clicks.

Brightmetrics analytics, when seamlessly integrated with Mitel-powered systems, allow TCI clients to maximize the value of their data and investments.

Are you ready to apply agent performance metrics to re-energize your call center? Contact TCI at (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.
 

Want Faster Broadband Services for Less?

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Finding ways to improve high-speed connections for voice and data networking, while cutting costs, is important for the financial health and competitiveness of any business. One way to achieve fast results is to have the TCI team look over your provider’s bills and look for ways to optimize your services.

Our decades of industry experience with the leading carriers, cable companies, cloud providers, and manufacturers give our broadband experts an insider’s view to assist in sourcing best-fit solutions for your business.

As your advocate, we recommend the providers offering the best service with the best pricing. We lay out all the options so you can make a well-informed decision to meet your unique needs.

Based on our continuously updated knowledge of all the product and service offerings, here’s our approach…

  • Undertake a thorough review of your services, invoices, agreements, and providers.
  • Evaluate your spending, find better deals and service arrangements, and uncover savings.
  • Lay out all the alternatives and offer recommendations with a clear projection of your savings.
  • Implement your choices by acting as your agent to place orders with the service providers.
  • Track installation progress and manage escalations.
  • Provide a single point of contact for all your voice, data, and Internet needs.

Improve the financial health and competitiveness of your business by making sure you have the latest services, the most responsive support, and the best pricing.

Contact TCI at (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.
 

Keeping Up with the New Generations of Workers and the Electronic Workplace

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The Connected Generations

Millennials and Generation Z, born from the early 1980s to early 2010s, now represent a significant proportion of the workplace. These generations have grown up in a world where the internet, smart devices and instant connectivity are ubiquitous. They expect the same simple, connected communication platforms at work as they’ve been used to in other areas of their lives.

The frequency and preference of communication channels vary depending on the generation. Millennials, for example, often avoid face-to-face interactions in the workplace, with 55% preferring online messaging software and 28% choosing email to communicate. And for Gen Z, frequency is critical. Over 65% say they need regular feedback from their line manager to stay in their job. For business leaders and IT teams, it means finding a simple way to accommodate these diverse preferences to ensure maximum productivity and inclusion.

The Race to Stay Ahead

These changes have brought an influx of applications and communication channels, which can negatively impact productivity. Using disparate systems will slow down a business. When systems aren’t compatible, transferring data and knowledge from one program to another or person to another can be arduous. And for IT teams, staying on top of management and training to use the systems takes even longer.

Plus, employees are less than impressed with the daunting number of channels. Almost a quarter of IT professionals have found that the communication options available can overwhelm staff. It also makes tracking information harder and more time-consuming, forcing a long search across platforms to see the details needed. The solution is simple: implement one easy-to-use tool.

Today’s IT departments are under more pressure than ever. From the growing demands of the workforce to disparate systems, the current day-to-day workload is complex and time-consuming. TCI recommends exploring a solution that unifies communication into one platform across the whole business – simplifying life for your IT teams and the workforce.

Choose to Embrace the Future

TCI offers unified communications and collaboration solutions that support IT teams. We give you the power to choose which systems to make available and how to roll them out. Our flexible approach lets you choose on-prem, cloud, or hybrid, when to upgrade, and which systems to make available to which employees. We’ll work with you to uncover your unique business requirements before tailoring a solution to meet them.

Are you ready for the evolution of the electronic office? We’re here to help you drive your business forward.
Contact us today: (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.
 

Contact Center Innovations… Transform Your Bank or Credit Union’s Customer & Employee Experience

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The two digital transformation opportunities that promise the most significant impact for banks and credit unions are reinventing their contact centers and branch and office operations. We’ll focus on how banks can capitalize on each opportunity with Mitel Financial Services Solutions.

Creating the Customer Experience of the Future

The role of a bank’s contact center is evolving from focusing on customer problem resolution to becoming a hub for comprehensive customer relationship management. For contact center managers, this transition requires that they meet new customer, management, and employee expectations.

  • Customers expect various services to be provided by knowledgeable agents who have the skills, product knowledge, and resources to identify the right solution for them and implement it efficiently.
  • Bank Management wants their contact center to deliver efficient, personalized service. They also need agents to possess product knowledge and telesales expertise to meet sales objectives. And they expect agents to accomplish both goals while ensuring every transaction mitigates potential fraud and meets security and compliance regulations.
  • Employees desire their contact center managers to empower them to successfully achieve these goals while providing them the flexibility to maintain a work/life balance. Like many businesses today, banks struggle with employee retention, putting two fundamental goals — customer service and compliance — at risk.

Call centers must rise to these new expectations quickly without increasing staff. Thankfully, they can count on TCI’s local expertise and Mitel’s technology to help meet everyone’s expectations.

Providing Personalized Service via Self-Serve Channels

Mitel’s MiContact Center Business is an omnichannel customer experience management platform that gives financial institutions the tools to deliver personalized service on a customer’s preferred channel, be it phone, email, SMS, Web chat, chat/voice bot, social media, etc.

Mitel Virtual Agent – a Google Cloud Contact Center AI-powered tool that works with MiContact Center Business – provides an informal chat or voice bot to act as a virtual agent, delivering services, promoting new products, and providing personalized customer experiences – all without human intervention.

Banks can also leverage Mitel’s self-service Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system with their contact center with optional speech recognition that helps identify the customer’s intent, segment, authenticate, and route customers to the best agents to handle the request. Customers searching for simple information can find it by chatting with the virtual agent without speaking to live agents.

Integrating virtual assistants like PolyAI with Mitel’s MiContact Center Business personalizes the service, reduces call volumes, lowers call abandonment rates, and allows agents to dedicate their time to helping customers with more complex requests.

Empowering Call Center Agents with Up-to-Date Customer Intelligence

When you’re accountable for customer relationship management, context is everything. The better you understand a customer, the better you can meet their needs.

That’s why Mitel Contact Center and unified communications solutions integrate seamlessly with CRM solutions like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Freshdesk, Oracle, and SAP. While speaking to customers, agents can access CRM intelligence to understand their history, preferences, and buying behaviors. In addition, Mitel integrations with solutions like Jack Henry and Bankerv provide agents with CRM intelligence via screen pops that include member details, contact history, and recommended responses.

These CRM and digital banking integrations drive improvements in agent productivity and contact center metrics in two ways:

  • Agents can resolve customer issues faster, improving service quality and metrics like first–contact resolution, call transfer rates, and net promoter scores.
  • Agents can upsell and cross-sell products more effectively, improving sales per hour and net sales metrics.

Mitel’s MiContact Center Business supports customer-based routing to empower agent success further. If specific agents are better suited to handling certain customers and issues, customer-based routing automatically routes a caller to the agent best equipped to serve them.

And by providing every agent with Mitel’s MiVoice Business and collaboration tools, they can efficiently bring additional expertise to resolve complex issues. Agents can quickly search for available experts and collaborate with them in real-time via phone, messaging, or video. And if they need to transfer the customer to that expert, they can do so with the click of a button.

Schedule time with TCI’s local experts to learn how Mitel Financial Services Solutions can help your contact center thrive in the digital age, improve your bottom line, and adhere to security, compliance, and fraud mitigation requirements. Contact us today: (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.